Subscribe
About
  • Home
  • /
  • Virtualisation
  • /
  • Youth Month reflections: Are we moving the dial with the youth unemployment crisis?

Youth Month reflections: Are we moving the dial with the youth unemployment crisis?

Here is a perspective from the future-forward Deviare Africa youth development platform.

Johannesburg, 27 Jun 2023

With youth unemployment rising on the continent with the highest young population, Africa, it has become imperative that we challenge the norm by creating a youth that is work ready and an enterprise ecosystem that is open to integrate and absorb this talent into productive work.

What the leaders at Deviare Africa have come to understand is that there is no success or prosperity without integrating the youth into productive work. They have worked hard to build a platform that is creating work-ready youth who can be integrated into productive environments. For the past six years, Deviare Africa’s tried and tested youth development platform, aptly named Youth Campus, has successfully trained over 4 000 youth (and counting) with an astounding 75% absorption rate into various working environments.

The Deviare Youth Campus is a self-built platform that offers an immersive classroom-in-the-cloud experience that transcends the traditional ways of face-to-face learning. It features the interactive live virtual classes, tutorials, assignments, video content and other online self-learning material and internationally benchmarked examinations. It gets even more immersive where learners get a unique opportunity to devise innovative solutions for real-world problems through project work completed in virtual labs, which are graded by leading industry experts.

Before any learning can commence, the student is put through a series of assessments to build a robust understanding of the person. These assessments assist in identifying levels of readiness for future fit skills and competencies. This way a learner can be matched to a developmental path and career map that best suits them.

In this way, before a student even decides which digital career path they will embark on, there is a clear map charting which digital careers are available to them based on their individual abilities and inclinations. Digital careers are rapidly changing to meet the demands of a world post 4IR and, as such, qualifications are re-evaluated and tech degrees are no longer required for an individual to participate in the workplace.

The challenge that many youths are facing is the fact that they hold a certification but are never considered for the workplace because of the lack of work experience. The leadership at Deviare have considered this challenge and, through Deviare’s partnerships with start-ups around the globe, are empowering the youth who have been educated through their development platform with on-the-job work experience that forms part of the immersive experience being offered on the Deviare Youth Campus.

A platform-based learning experience allows for data to be captured at every stage of the learning process and this is what Deviare’s platform captures incredibly well. Each student has their path from the assessment stage, skills training through to their on-the-job training and work readiness presented through Digital Badges on the new yet successful Ubuntu X Talent Network.

The user-friendly and intuitive platform makes digital skills accessible to the youth, while the badge interface gives thorough information to employers looking to hire. Ubuntu X Talent Network is therefore an early-stage digital talent on demand platform that is a vital cog in the Youth Campus ecosystem where young people can be integrated into productive work and enterprises can explore, with ease, the new and emerging talent that Deviare is producing.

African youth have suffered with lack of access to development and training. Even after acquiring skills, opportunities are limited due to lack of work experience, but Deviare’s Youth Development programme has solved these challenges for more than six years and has the data to prove this success. 

It's all in the numbers: 4 000 youths trained with a 75% success rate in integrating these youths in productive work. We can firmly agree that the Deviare Youth Campus is challenging the problem of youth unemployment, one youth at a time.

Share